Steele research, that you conducted your own research on Russia. And I think you have shared with us some of that. Is there other elements of your Russian research that would be helpful to us?
MR. SIMPSON: One of the things, you know, that we worked on, I just saw a story coming in here sort of about financial transfers from Russia through Russian, you know, diplomatic entities, and how that was something that, you know, there have been SARs on. And you know, we investigated -- so there was in one of the early memos, might even have been the first one, said "Money is being distributed in the United States through the auspices of pension payments." And you know, they are basically getting the money into the country and handing it out using fake pension payments. And this is like one of those things that I ran down as a way of evaluating the credibility of the dossier or of this memo. And so the question is, Well, do the Russians hand out lots of money in the United States through pension payments? And the answer is they do. And it's actually kind of interesting. I mean there is a ton, or many thousands of Russian emigres who -- you know, it was a communist country, so everyone worked for the government, so the government has liabilities, pension liabilities in the U.S. that are big.
And furthermore, there has been investigations by the Social Security Administration about those payments and about whether some Russian emigres are getting Social Security from both countries. And those are just ordinary fraud investigations whether the recipients are engaged in a form of welfare fraud. But in the course of all that, it lays out some of the operation of how this money moves. And that all depicted to me a perfect way of moving money in the United States that was largely untraceable, and protected by diplomatic privileges.
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
